as
vaguely conscious that he had promised to visit the home of the girl
who had certainly given him no invitation to come further into her
life, but for whose word of welcome he knew that he should always long.

BOOK III

THE DAY OF THE CATTLE

CHAPTER XVII

ELLISVILLE THE RED

Gourdlike, Ellisville grew up in a night. It was not, and lo! it was.
Many smokes arose, not moving from crest to crest of the hills as in
the past, when savage bands of men signalled the one to the other, but
rising steadily, in combined volume, a beacon of civilization set far
out in the plains, assuring, beckoning. Silently, steadily, the people
came to this rallying place, dropping in from every corner of the
stars. The long street spun out still longer its string of toylike
wooden houses. It broke and doubled back upon itself, giving
Ellisville title to unique distinction among all the cities of the
plains, which rarely boasted more than a single street. The big hotel
at the depot sheltered a colony of restless and ambitious life. From
the East there came a minister with his wife, both fresh from college.
They remained a week. The Cottage Hotel had long since lost its key,
and day and night there went on vast revelry among the men of the wild,
wide West, then seeing for the first time what seemed to them the joy
and glory of life. Little parties of men continually came up from the
South, in search of opportunity to sell their cattle. Little parties
of men came from the East, seeking to buy cattle and land. They met at
the Cottage, and made merry in large fashion, seeing that this was a
large land, and new, and unrestrained.

Land and cattle, cattle and land. These themes were upon the lips of
all, and in those days were topics of peace and harmony. The cattleman
still stood for the nomadic and untrammelled West, the West of wild and
glorious tradition. The man who sought for land was not yet recognised
as the homesteader, the man of anchored craft, of settled convictions,
of adventures ended. For one brief, glorious season the nomad and the
home dweller shook hands in amity, not pausing to consider wherein
their interests might differ. For both, this was the West, the free,
unbounded, illimitable, exhaustless West--Homeric, Titanic, scornful to
metes and bounds, having no scale of little things.

Here and there small, low houses, built of the soil and clinging grimly
to the soil, made indistinct dots upon the